Defective by Design had protests about it in London and in Manchester.

Then, the BBC released a Flash version, but as Flash isn't free
software, users of free software operating systems were still left in
the cold. Ashley Highfield laughably estimated there were 400 GNU/Linux users in
the entire UK, and was proven badly wrong.

In March 2008, the BBC launched an iPhone version, despite the lack of a version for GNU/Linux anywhere to be seen.

The iPhone version of iPlayer didn't even use DRM. A little bit of
digging and various members of the free software community discovered
a way to play back the content using free software, something the BBC
had failed to manage.